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The Billing Office Time Audit
Most billing offices can’t say where the week actually went — the drag hides inside “normal.” This worksheet walks you through auditing your own floor in about 30 minutes: seven work categories, real hours, honest scores. It’s the same exercise we ran on our own billing office before we automated it.
You can’t fix a drag you’ve stopped noticing.
Repeated work doesn’t feel like a problem — it feels like the job. Packets get assembled, remits get deciphered, the same claim gets touched five times, and none of it shows up anywhere as a cost. When we finally audited our own floor, the honest numbers were what pushed us to build tools at all. Run the same audit on yours: worst case, you spend half an hour and learn where your week goes.
Map the hours — seven categories, real numbers.
Print this page (the worksheet prints clean, without the website around it) or copy the table. For each category: write who touches the work, then estimate hours per week across everyone who touches it. Use last week — the real one with the phone ringing — not an ideal week. Ask the people who do the work; owners guess low.
| Category | Who touches it | Hrs/week (all people) | Drag signals (step 2) | Score 0–3 (step 3) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claim follow-upchasing status, re-touching the same claim, tracking who owns the next step | ||||
| Posting & EOB reviewreading EOBs line by line, catching denials and adjustments before posting | ||||
| Remit / 835 processingopening 835 files, turning remits into workable documents, filing them | ||||
| Appeals draftingwriting letters, hunting documentation, finding the right recipient | ||||
| Benefit verification & intaketaking requests by phone/fax, running checks, filling VOB forms, delivering back | ||||
| Cover sheets & packet prepassembling cover sheets, claims, and notes into submission packets | ||||
| Handoffs & reworkthe in-between: work waiting on someone, corrections, “can you resend that” |
Mark the drag signals.
Hours alone don’t tell you where the pain is — ten smooth hours beat four miserable ones. For each category, mark every signal that applies in the “Drag signals” column:
- I — Interrupted: the work rarely gets done in one sitting; it’s squeezed between phone calls
- R — Redone: it comes back — corrections, resends, retyping something that existed somewhere else
- W — Waiting: it stalls in a handoff; the next step lives in someone’s head or inbox
- M — Memory-dependent: only one person knows how to do it right
Score each category, then read the results.
Score each row 0–3, honestly:
Runs itself
Low hours, no drag signals. Leave it alone.
Managed
Real hours, but smooth — one signal at most.
Drags
Meaningful hours plus two or more drag signals.
Daily pain
Everyone knows this one. It shapes the whole day.
Reading your results
- Any category at 6+ hours/week with a score of 2–3 is an automation candidate — that’s repeated, structured work a tool can carry
- A high “Handoffs & rework” row usually isn’t its own problem — it’s the exhaust of the other six. Fix the sources and it falls
- Lots of “M” marks mean your process lives in people’s heads — the riskiest kind of drag, because it leaves when they do
- Multiply your total weekly drag hours by your loaded hourly cost for the honest monthly number. On our own floor, that exercise is what started everything — our tools now return more than 60 measured hours of hands-on work a month in our office. Your number is yours; the audit will tell you.
Want the printable version in your inbox?
We’ll send the print-ready audit worksheet and scoring sheet. That’s all the email is for.
Prefer not to share an email? No problem — open the print-ready worksheet here and print it directly. The audit is free either way.
Bring your audit to a workflow review.
Twenty free minutes with someone who runs a billing floor. We’ll go through your scores, show you which jobs our tools would take over — and tell you honestly which categories a tool won’t fix.
Request my workflow review